Building a Vans RV-7 custom-built airplane in the greater Boston area

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Marathon airplane building

Did some marathon airplane building over the last three days, and Ellen and I managed to complete the left flap. First, I pulled the bottom skin off and riveted the ribs to it, bucking bar access is a lot better without the upper skin in place!Next, I reassembled the flap without the spar. Ellen and I riveted the upper skin-to-rib and bottom skin overlap rivets. Access was tight, but the tungsten bucking bar made riveting relatively easy.Ellen did the shooting, I bucked…The next day I reinstalled the spar and pop-riveted the rib leading edge tabs. Nothing too tricky here, just need to gently push aside the flap leading egde to get the pop riveter in place. I used my cheapo riveter which I ground down to fit in tight spaces, worked fine.After that, I solo-shot the upper skin-to-spar rivets and squeezed the rib-to-skin rivets – came out great!

Before squeezing the spar/skin/hinge rivets, I removed one eye from the center of each hinge. This is where the flap hinge pins will be inserted; I liked this idea better than drilling a hole in the inboard aileron bracket to facilitate inserting the hinge pin.

Squeezing the spar/skin/hinge rivets was easy, just had to make sure the squeezer set was narrow enough to make the shop head without hitting the hinge eye.

The only remaining task was to squeeze the rivets that secure the flap brace angles. Easy-peasy…

Don’t know why I didn’t get a shot of the completed left flap…but it looks just like the right one – so keep reading. One more thing… this flap came out with zero twist. Very cool!